French physicist Léon Foucault celebrated in Google doodle

Google's latest doodle marks the birthday of Jean Bernard Léon Foucault, the French physicist and inventor of a pendulum that demonstrated the rotation of the earth.

Foucault is also credited with making an early measurement of the speed of light and with the discovery of eddy currents: electric currents induced within conductors by a changing magnetic field in the conductor, which are sometimes called Foucault currents.

The son of a publisher, Foucault was born in Paris in 1819, where he initially studied medicine but soon switched to physics. Initially, the primary focus of his research was into LJM Daguerre's photographic processes, while he was also an assistant to the bacteriologist Alfred Donne in the course of his work on microscopic anatomy....